Ultrasonographic criteria for the major salivary glands: a perspective for the application of new technologies

It emerges from the interesting recent article by David et al. (4) on high-resolution ultrasound is the first line examination for parotid gland diffuse disease and focal lesions, normally using grey-scale and color-Doppler ultrasound especially using contrast media. Further-more, this working group present a review of the current literature on contrast-enhanced ultrasound for the assessment of parotid gland lesions, considering all characteristics of the technique, evidence of usefulness, future perspectives and limitations. We consider that this type of investigation will be helpful in preoperative treatment planning and reduce the cost to plan the correct treatment of diseases of the parotid glands. I am interested in underlining this article because it shows the advantages of the use of contrast in ultrasound and opens a debate if the non-invasiveness of the ultrasound and the use of the contrast agent have reason to be compared to the use of diagnostics with heavy machines such as CT and MRI. The article is clear on this point the limits are there and it is a challenge to identify new technologies to open unexplored frontiers, to know the disease early and manage it. Making it easier for the patient throughout the diagnosis, therapy, controls and possible follow-up

Multinuclear NMR spectroscopy and isotopomer distribution analysis applied to metabolic phenotype characterization of complex systems

In the present work, the complex metabolic effects of a rag8 genetic mutation performed on Kluyveromyces lactis yeast cells is investigated with a specific, ‘information-rich’ analytical approach: differential NMR metabolomics. The use of such NMR-based metabolite profiling techniques form the basis for intelligent screening strategies to exploit the biotechnological potentials of yeasts because the rational improvement of K. lactis strains for the production of primary and secondary metabolites requires, first of all, a quantitative understanding of their metabolism, allowing the development of more efficient cell factories through metabolic engineering. Wild-type and mutant cell lines metabolomes are compared each other: through the application of multivariate statistical models a metabolic network is built on statistical basis, describing the metabolite phenotype of the rag8 mutant K. lactis strain. However, the measurement and interpretation of such in vivo metabolite dynamics at a systems level is inherently difficult. Indeed, decipher the intricate web of metabolic networks of a complex system and, particularly, infer something about gene functions only based on metabolite profiling, is one of the greatest challenges in molecular biology which cannot be resolved fully by any metabolomic tool. To resolve and improve the metabolic network description, an extension of the 13C labeling protocol for investigating eukaryotic cellular systems is applied in this work. The resulting labeling pattern of each metabolite reflects the relative importance of the alternative pathways within the metabolic network. This observation underscores the need for acquiring 13C-isotopomer data, instead of just steady-state concentrations, to deduce meaningful relationships between metabolites in related pathways. It was displayed that differential 13C-labeled isotopomer profiles and abundance can serve as a fingerprint of the metabolic networks activity and could reflects both qualitative and quantitative differences in the metabolic pathways that lead to the synthesis of each metabolite. In this way, the role of several metabolic processes could be defined, allowing the exploration of metabolic pathways, leading to qualitative information on the links between labeled precursors and their products and quantitative information on metabolic fluxes. It was demonstrated that in yeasts it has been possible to make significant progress in the analysis of carbon metabolism by using 13C NMR to measure metabolic fluxes in genetically modified cells. This approach, so, can be used for functional genomic analysis of yeast mutants providing detailed quantitative information for the understanding of a biological network useful to identify the key genes for strain improvement. Moreover, an intelligent screening of the large unexploited fungal biodiversity opens the possibility to the development and use of directed genetic modifications of cell factories for the production of novel compounds, that are otherwise difficult to produce by chemical synthesis, and also of new, efficient and environmentally friendly bioprocesses. These possibilities open the way to many comparative functional studies and will certainly change the respective importance of the different yeasts, building up new model yeasts for specific studies

UV Opacity in Nearby Galaxies and Application to Distant Galaxies

The effects of dust opacity on the radiation of nearby and distant galaxies are reviewed. The geometrical distribution of the dust inside the galaxy plays a fundamental role in determining the wavelength dependence of the obscuration and the opacity of the galaxy. In the local Universe, late Hubble type galaxies appear to contain enough dust that corrections for the effect of obscuration become important. This is true expecially at blue and UV wavelengths, i.e. in the wavelength range of interest for studies of massive stars and star formation processes. Multiwavelength observations provide a powerful tool for characterizing the reddening caused by dust. A `recipe' is given for removing the dust reddening and recovering the UV and optical light in star-forming galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, 2 encapsulated Postscript figures, aipproc.sty macro, to appear in the Proceedings of the Conference `The Ultraviolet Universe at Low and High Redshift' (College Park, MD, May 2-4, 1997

Integrating Conflicting Perspectives

"Theory of mind� describes the ability to impute mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, to oneself and to other people. Usually we want to know why people did what they did and we wonder what they are going to do next. That is, everyday we try to predict and explain human behaviour. In order to do this we refer to a person"s beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions etc. Behaviour is the product of belief and desire: People do things because they desire something and believe some act will achieve it. For adults it is clear that our assumptions about reality do not necessarily match the real world; but we know, regardless of whether our beliefs are true or not, our beliefs direct our actions. In contrast, it is not until the age of 4 years that children understand that one can be mistaken about the world and that actions can be based on this false belief

The Hare and the King’s Daughter

In this inteview Luisa Nativi performs and translates a tale about the intelligent Hare (Karamojong, Uganda)The Verba Africana series publishes video recording of African verbal arts on CDRom's, DVD’s and the Internet. This series responds to the increasing need for new electronic tools that integrate the written and audio-visual materials for research, teaching and learning of African languages and oral literatures. The video recording of oral genres, such as poems, songs and tales, is integrated into the presentation of relevant aspects (language, form, content, performance, literary, social and historical context). The videos and the accompanying material (short information and full articles) allow researchers and the interested public to approach oral literary productions as ‘total event’.NWO, The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Researc

Dust in External Galaxies

Existing (Spitzer Space Telescope) and upcoming (Herschel Space Telescope) facilities are deepening our understanding of the role of dust in tracing the energy budget and chemical evolution of galaxies. The tools we are developing while exploring the local Universe will in turn become pivotal in the interpretation of the high redshift Universe when near--future facilities (the Atacama Large Millimeter Array [ALMA], the Sub--Millimeter Array [SMA], the Large Millimeter Telescope [LMT], the James Webb Space Telescope [JWST]), and, possibly, farther--future ones, will begin operations.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, invited review at the conference `Cosmic Dust - Near & Far', Heidelberg, Germany, September 2008. ASP Conference Series, Eds. T. Henning et a

The Capacity of the Gaussian Cooperative Two-user Multiple Access Channel to within a Constant Gap

The capacity region of the cooperative two-user Multiple Access Channel (MAC) in Gaussian noise is determined to within a constant gap for both the Full-Duplex (FD) and Half-Duplex (HD) case. The main contributions are: (a) for both FD and HD: unilateral cooperation suffices to achieve capacity to within a constant gap where only the user with the strongest link to the destination needs to engage in cooperation, (b) for both FD and HD: backward joint decoding is not necessary to achieve capacity to within a constant gap, and (c) for HD: time sharing between the case where the two users do not cooperate and the case where the user with the strongest link to the destination acts as pure relay for the other user suffices to achieve capacity to within a constant gap. These findings show that simple achievable strategies are approximately optimal for all channel parameters with interesting implications for practical cooperative schemes.Comment: Submitted to the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2013